ROMANS 6-8 By Norman P. Grubb

A STARTLING STATEMENT
A much deeper problem needs to be solved in order to make workable the life of being dead to sin and alive to God through Christ. We must be dead to law, as well as to sin. But why? Is not the law a safeguard to keep us from running into loose living? “No,” Paul maintains. “You have a much deeper reality to learn — that you have no independent human self, which keeps or doesn’t keep the law. You are really just a slave to the deity who owns you, and it is his law you keep.”
Paul slips in a statement here which sounds startling, but which turns the key in the lock for us when we know it. “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” he states, “because you are not under law, but under grace” (Rom. 6:14). But what does that mean? Many would ask, “Is not the Law the standard for right living, announced by Moses in those Ten Commandments and demanded of us by God, with the penalty of judgment and wrath if we disobey it? Is not the Law the means by which God exercises His control over us and by which we endeavour to live? Obviously, we would go wildly into lives of self-gratifying license if the conditions of the Law were removed.”
But this is our vast error. We have been under the Satanic delusion of being independent selves who can and must respond to law. And while we think this, we are actually still slaves to Satan, who compels us either to try and fulfill or to resist God’s laws, thereby obeying his own law of sin and death. So the more we think we should obey God’s Law, the more Satan is aroused to make us break it. And we shall always have this problem while we blindly think we are independent selves who can keep the law.
You are receiving this email because you signed up at http://www.normangrubb.com